Why Nvidia?

[Ksanti]

Now, I don't want to start a fanboy war here, but what is the arguement for the new Fermi cards over the 5000 series? Or Nvidia cards in general?

I can see PhysX could perhaps be a conceivable advantage in some situations, but that just adds to the price tag. As far as I can tell, there is no Nvidia card on the market that outperforms an equivalently prices ATi offering.

For example, the 5850 destroys the GTX 285 in pretty much any benchmark as far as I can tell, yet most 285's sell at around £300, and have only just hit a £240 mark with the release of Fermi, still more expensive than 5850 base marks.

I was under the impression the 480 is set to take on the 5870, and the 470 the 5850, but the 470 is pretty much 5870 money, and the 480 is closer to dual 5850's?

I could understand why one might go with nvidia if planning to go Quad SLi, simply because the 480 is slightly faster than the 5870, if money was no object, but there seems to be a lot more support for Fermi than in the ultra high-end market?

I don't want to trigger a flame war, but as far as I can see, the 5000 cards outperform the 400 cards consistently, and even now the 5000 cards still have better value than even the 200 series cards, and then the 4000 cards that are still being sold are even better priced.

So what is it that makes people love Fermi and at the moment Nvidia? I accept that fanboys exist but I don't get people logically choosing Nvidia over ATi for the most part right now?

 

[D.P.]

The 480 is the fastest single GPU every made in the history of mankind. Period.

Value for money is a more or less nonsense term, getting extra performance is never a linear function. Buying a car/house/antique/TV that is 20% better than another will never cost you only 20% more money.

Yes, you can overlook. But many people don't want to.
Yes, you can buy a 5970 and have all those issues of stuttering and lack of ATI driver support in games etc.

If you are a high end user who would buy a 480, then you will already have a good enough PSU and you wont care about heat (otherwise you can buy a passive cooled older gen card, under clock your CPU etc).


And that is just performance. Feature wise, Nvidia cards offer much more. Maybe you want a CUDA enabled card, or enjoy PhysX, or appreciate Nvidia 3D support.


And then their is driver support. If you use Linux then you can realistically only use Nvidia cards without getting laughed at. This is the reason I will only ever buy Nvidia cards. I don't give 2 hoots about absolute performance differences. Stable Linux drivers out of the box that are up to date.

And for me CUDA is super important and very interesting. Our lab has pre-ordered a couple of 480 to check out CUDA performance.

 

[no_1_dave]

For me, 3D Vision.
If Nvidia's 3D Vision worked on a 5870 i'd get that this time round but it doesnt so I will be getting 470/480.

 

[chiLLZ]

the 5870 vs 480 subject, I like the 5870, because of its efficiency and price one disadvantage for me is at high resolutions and game details maxed out it runs out of memory and fps drop like a stone. People might consider a overclocked 470 instead of a 480 with its 1280mb memory once they realise that 1gb of memory is not enough for some situations any more. of course the 2gb 5870 are just around the corner.

 

[bhavv]

So you can run all your games the way they were meant to be played.

 

[RavenXXX2]

480 most powerful GPU, LMAO, if you think the performance difference to a stock 5870 is worthy of best GPU then you're fanboi to the extreme, and the fact it consumes more power than a 5970 and can boil water, yeah decent purchase. 480 is an embarrassment.

http://www.bit-tech.net/

http://www.techpowerup.com/

http://www.hardocp.com/reviews.html?cat=MyxWaWRlbyBDYXJkLGhlbnRodXNpYXN0

http://techgage.com/article/nvidia_geforce_gtx_480_-_gf100_has_landed/

 

[D.P.]

I thought you were Perma Banned. Better be careful with your insulting posts and fanboy accusations.

 

[londonbairn]

I thought you were Perma Banned. Better be careful with your insulting posts and fanboy accusations.

Insults aside, he did post benchmarks!

 

[rypt]

For me, 3D Vision.

ATi are about to launch their own 3D product ...

 

[RavenXXX2]

I thought you were Perma Banned. Better be careful with your insulting posts and fanboy accusations.

Insults, what insults, and I didn't call anyone a fanboi directly, so get your facts straight, you get your finger on the RTM link you see I provide unequivocal factual evidence on these boards, peps don't like that.

 

[D.P.]

Insults aside, he did post benchmarks!

Hand selected benchmarks showing the worst performance side of the the 480 form not very good review websites. Going through a reliable source like Anandtech and looking at the reasonable resolution settings with AA etc, the GF480 is about 20% across many games, sometimes as much as 35-40%, and looking at minimum frame rates which are often more important there is often at least a 30% advantage, sometimes more. Now there are some games and some settings that are worse, perhaps with a 10% average improvement. Some games even slightly worse performance than the 5870. But the few settings and games that performance is reduced aren't so interesting at this stage. Drivers will likely have a big effect in the next 6 months.

 

[RavenXXX2]

Plenty of more reviews on the web showing a 5870 matching the 480 in most titles, and the ones it gets beat by a few FPS are TWIMTB titles, google them people, and see the truth.

and I quote

We are seeing some trades back and forth; in some games the GTX 480 is slightly faster, in other games the HD 5870 is slightly faster. There wasn’t anything that really stood out, other than Metro 2033. Once again, we have to factor in cost, power, and heat. The GeForce GTX 480 consumes more power than the HD 5870, produces more heat, and costs more money (which might also include the cost of a new PSU). It doesn’t seem like the best value with all this factored in. The only thing that "blew us away" was the heat coming out of the video card and the sound of the fan.

http://www.hardocp.com/article/2010/03/26/nvidia_fermi_gtx_470_480_sli_review/8

 

[Xinn]

Drivers will likely have a big effect in the next 6 months.

nVidia drivers have been amazing recently

 

[D.P.]

http://www.anandtech.com/show/2977/...tx-470-6-months-late-was-it-worth-the-wait-/9

We’ve also gone ahead and recorded the minimum framerates for Crysis, as in our testing we’ve found the minimums to be very reliable. And in doing so, we have some data even more interesting than the averages. The GTX 400 series completely tramples the 5000 series when it comes to minimum framerates, far more than we would have expected. At 2560 Crysis is approaching a video RAM limitation in our 1GB and under cards, which gives the GTX 480 cards a clear lead at those resolutions. But even at lower resolutions where we’re not video RAM limited, the GTX 480 still enjoys a 33% lead in the minimum framerate, and the GTX 470 is well ahead of the 5850 and even slightly ahead of the 5870.

For whatever reason AMD can’t seem to keep up with NVIDIA when it comes to the minimum framerate, even at lower resolutions. Certainly it’s obvious when the 1GB cards are video RAM limited at 2560, but if we didn’t have this data we would have never guessed the minimum framerates were this different at lower resolutions.

Finally we have a quick look at SLI/CF performance. CF seems to exacerbate the video RAM limitations of the 5000 series, resulting in the GTX 480SLI coming in even farther ahead of the 5870CF. Even at lower resolutions SLI seems to be scaling better than CF.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/2977/...x-470-6-months-late-was-it-worth-the-wait-/10

This is another game that treats the GTX 400 series well. The GTX 480 is 20-30% ahead of the Radeon 5870, and the GTX 470 is 12-25% ahead of the 5850. Not surprisingly, the GTX 480SLI is also in a solid lead over the 5870CF.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/2977/...x-470-6-months-late-was-it-worth-the-wait-/11

Even with the DX11 ComputeShader, the story remains the same for the GTX 400 series.The GTX 480 enjoys a 20-30% lead, and the GTX 470 takes a smaller 20-25% lead. At this point the GTX 470 is even trading blows with the 5870.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/2977/...x-470-6-months-late-was-it-worth-the-wait-/12

So far, NVIDIA’s leads keep increasing. With HAWX we’re up to a 20-35% lead for the GTX 480, and a 7-30% lead for the GTX 470. On the SLI/CF front however we have a slightly different story. NVIDIA is still in the lead, but their lead ends up shrinking here compared to the more demanding lead a single card has.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/2977/...x-470-6-months-late-was-it-worth-the-wait-/13

The first game for the 480 to loose, ooh by a whopping 6-9% and at 2560x1600 with 8X MSAA there is still 100FPS so it is not important.

Similar here:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/2977/...x-470-6-months-late-was-it-worth-the-wait-/14

The 480 is substantially slower avergae FPS. No doubt future drivers will improve this. However, more important to game play is the minimum frame rate where the 480 is 46% faster than the 5870.


And so on, and on and on.

 

[RavenXXX2]

Yeah stick with one site, I'll take in the majority of reviews and then make a judgment, which I did, plenty of other sites showing the min on the 5870 to be equal or more than a 480, either way for a card that's six moths late, at best 10% better than a 5870, hot as hell, and consumes more power than a 5970, I came to the conclusion that the 480 is travesty of a card, 99% of all other peps have to.

 

[Parsley]

You called someone else a fanboy D.P....

Seems very much like you are possibly the biggest one in this thread to me really . You're also posting hand picked benchmarks, and you seem to be regretfully leaving out the real potential overclocking headroom on the ATI cards.

If the 480 had been better or cost significantly less I would have more seriously considered one... and I would also need a new PSU in order to run it so you are making sweeping statements left, right and center. People who care about performance can also care about heat and noise levels as well... I do at least, maybe I am just odd?

With regards to the feature sets... I am a gamer, so most of Fermis special feature set really doesn't bother me (although yes it will appeal to others). I also still think that PhysX has the potential to be a nice little feature... but name me one game recently that has really needed PhysX to be enjoyable to play or function at all as a game?

Drivers... that keeps on cropping up as if the guys in the green camp haven't had just as long to play with drivers as the guys in the red camp. *sigh*

All so silly.

 

[The Running Man]

what about DXVA playback?

thats one reason to ditch ATI forever really

 

[RavenXXX2]

Oh look, see how the 480 tramples all over the 5870 in the minimum framerate department, plenty more on the web..

 

[Parsley]

Bah edit fail !

 

[londonbairn]

Hand selected benchmarks showing the worst performance side of the the 480 form not very good review websites. Going through a reliable source like Anandtech and looking at the reasonable resolution settings with AA etc, the GF480 is about 20% across many games, sometimes as much as 35-40%, and looking at minimum frame rates which are often more important there is often at least a 30% advantage, sometimes more. Now there are some games and some settings that are worse, perhaps with a 10% average improvement. Some games even slightly worse performance than the 5870. But the few settings and games that performance is reduced aren't so interesting at this stage. Drivers will likely have a big effect in the next 6 months.

Just like what you have just done